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Sunday, May 18, 2014

Saturday Night Live: Charlize Theron & The Black Keys

Wow, the most remarkable thing about this episode is how thoroughly mediocre it was. Like, I'm having a hard time remembering much of anything about it, and while that's probably understandable for everyone reading this who watched it weeks ago, I just watched it Saturday night for the first time. And I still can't remember much that jumped out at me, good or bad, though I do remember that most of what I did enjoy, I enjoyed on a more intellectual "I get why this is funny" level than because I was uproariously laughing at it. This wasn't the worst episode of the season by any means, but it almost feels like the nadir of the season nonetheless, just in terms of how the baseline has been so thoroughly established as "nothing terrible, nothing terribly good".Other Thoughts
Not sure how I feel about a monologue featuring a song that's all about how the host is a bad singer, but at least it's slightly different.

The mom game show sketch which led off the night is a great example of what I was talking about up top: it was well written, in that I thought "yes, those are things lots of moms say, and that is funny", but it wasn't like I was actually laughing at it all that much.

The return of Heshy, like everything else, was another case of a sketch being neither good nor bad enough to elicit much of a reaction from me. Nice to see Nasim Pedrad in a sketch, of course.

Update was weaker than even the new post-Meyers norm, and having Barbara Walters pop up was...fine, I guess. While it's always a pleasure to see Drunk Uncle, he was clearly the Update standout this week.

I'll say this for Charlize Theron: she was a trooper. I was impressed with how they were able to get all that whale blood off her in time for the next sketch (the musical break helped, of course; she was still bloodied when she introduced the second song).

This week's "end of the night Kyle Mooney pre-filmed sketch" was pretty good. It was as low-key, laughs-wise, as everything else, but that's more the norm here, and I appreciated that each of the actors managed to create a fully formed character out of each of the foreign tourist types, rather than just playing the easy stereotype for laughs.

Favorite Sketch: Probably the weird cat adoption one, which certainly wasn't the best written or performed sketch of the night, but the line about how one of the cats was a sociopath did make me laugh harder than anything.

Episodes Featuring a Game Show: 8/20Episodes Featuring a Talk Show: 12/20Episodes with a Monologue Featuring a Song: 9/20Episodes with a Monologue Technically Featuring a Song That Is Not a
Song for the Purposes of "Episodes with a Monologue Featuring a Song": 1/20